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Coming in to work, I pass 4 different supermarkets in less than 6 miles.
(Once I get on the highway, no more markets…)
Sitting on the parking lot light pole of one of them was a large,
apparently well fed, hawk. No other birds were immediately apparent.

That got me thinking about how when I was young, you never saw hawks around
here. You just didn’t. They weren’t here to see.
All of the shopping centers had pigeons and seagulls. There were flocks of
them anywhere people dropped food or there was a dumpster.
I remember when some parking lots would have large flocks of seagulls
taking over big sections of the lots.
That doesn’t seem as common now. And, there are the hawks looking over the
same parking lots.

Going home a couple of weeks ago, there was a dead dear on the side of the
road only about a mile from where I live.
The town I grew up in was (40 years ago) less urban then the one I live in
now. There were still a few farms, a few places that raised horses, some
with cows and several with chickens.
Never once in the 17 years I lived there, spending quite a bit of my free
time roaming the woods, did I ever see a deer or a sign of one.
Raccoons, skunks, squirrels, a few snakes and very rarely a pheasant.
None of them larger then my dog.

My wife gave me a present of a video series called “Last Chance to See”
which is sort of a video continuation of the book of the same name from 20+
years ago. They go back and look for some of the almost extinct animals
from 20 years ago and see if they can find them again.
It’s sad that some they couldn’t find. Either there were too few left in
the wild, or some had been declared extinct.

One of the strange things about the video is they show some of the
unintended consequences of things. The rain forest of Madagascar being
cleared to grow crops of material for recyclable packaging. Forests in
Indonesia being cleared to grow crops for bio-fuel.
Sometimes even when we think we’re helping, we aren’t.

But, hawks have become a fairly common sight around here. There don’t seem
to be quite as many seagulls and pigeons as there used to be. Deer
apparently are roaming around the town were I live.
At least there are some glimpses of light.